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128 chapter seven THE FRIEZE AS HISTORY L actantius, a Christian writer of the early fourth century A.D., tells a revealing story about the sufferings of the Roman emperor Valerian, captured through treachery by the Persian king Sapor in 260. “When King Sapor, who had captured him, wanted to mount a vehicle or a horse, he would order Valerian to kneel on all fours and, placing his foot on his back, he would reproach him, saying with a smile, ‘The Romans may paint things on their tablets and walls, but this is really the way it is!’”1 It is doubtful whether Sapor actually said these words, but there must have been enough truth in the idea behind them—that official Roman art often gave a less than accurate account of actual history—to give them convincing bite for Lactantius’s readers. The ease with which a painter or sculptor in Rome might misrepresent, deliberately or accidentally, the historical reality of events on a far-flung frontier of the empire is not hard to imagine. Misrepresentation is, however, very difficult to test for. In the poorly documented reign of Marcus Aurelius, this is especially true. The meager and frequently unreliable sources for the history of the reign of Marcus Aurelius make it almost impossible to reconstruct any more than a superficial account of the main events of his reign. The main literary sources for the period are two: Cassius Dio, a senator and historian who lived in the time of Septimius Severus; and the Historia Augusta, a collection of imperial biographies written (it seems) in the fourth century.2 The Historia Augusta is notoriously unreliable, a situation made worse by the fact that its biographic focus means that historical events are normally mentioned out of order. Dio, who should be an outstanding source for this period, has suffered in transmission: his text is only preserved in fragments cobbled together into an abbreviated history in the eleventh century by a Byzantine monk named Xiphilinus. Xiphilinus was varied in his method of abbreviation: descriptions of some major events seem to have been lifted entire from Dio’s text, but other parts are the work of Xiphilinus alone. Perhaps the greatest damage has come from the removal of the quoted sec- THE FRIEZE AS HISTORY · 129 tions from their original context: because Xiphilinus rearranged the selections to suit his own ends, the dates of these events, even their relative order, are sometimes impossible to reconstruct. A third source is the imperial coinage, but by the time of Marcus Aurelius this had become repetitive and generic in its types. It is useful for dating some few major events— Marcus’s victories and imperial acclamations, for example—but gives little or no insight into the detailed course of his reign or his wars. Given this depressing situation, the Column of Marcus Aurelius has offered generations of scholars the tantalizing prospect of an alternative, visual source for the history (at least part of it) of Marcus’s reign. The column seems to present a complete record of the entire course of Marcus’s Germanic wars, from beginning to end, in impressive detail. The thinking behind this is that if it is possible to correctly interpret the visual language of the frieze and connect our few historical sources to particular scenes within it, we might then be able to use the rest of the images to reconstruct the entire history of Marcus’s wars. That, at least, is the theory. But can this approach work in practice? The purpose of this chapter is to test the historicity of the column’s frieze from a number of different perspectives, from broad patterns of behavior down to the details of arms and equipment. It begins, however, with a focus on testing the historicity of individual scenes. Interest in historical themes is one of the most “Roman” characteristics of Roman art—it could in fact be described as the one that separates Roman art most clearly from the art of the Greeks. To understand the basis of the arguments surrounding the historicity of Marcus’s Column, its contents have to been seen in the context of the development of this particular line of Roman art. For this reason, the chapter begins with a survey of the history of Roman historical art. Its medium was (up to the second century A.D.) almost exclusively painting, and our knowledge of it is almost entirely restricted to descriptions in literary sources. Strong...

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